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Security and best practices for health checks

Implementing effective health checks is crucial for maintaining the reliability and performance of your services. This page shows best practices for designing, monitoring, and securing health checks.

Health check design​

  • Choose appropriate endpoints: Use lightweight endpoints specifically designed for health checks while avoiding endpoints that perform heavy operations or have side effects. Consider endpoints that validate critical dependencies such as databases and external APIs to ensure comprehensive health monitoring.
  • Set realistic timeouts: Configure timeouts based on your service's typical response times while accounting for network latency and processing time. Use shorter timeouts for critical services that should respond quickly to ensure timely detection of performance issues.
  • Use descriptive names: Use clear, descriptive names that identify the service and purpose, such as production-api-health, user-service-status, or payment-gateway-ping to make monitoring and troubleshooting more efficient.

Monitoring strategy​

  • Regular execution: Execute health checks regularly to catch issues early while considering the appropriate frequency based on service criticality. Balance monitoring frequency with system resources to ensure effective monitoring without overwhelming your infrastructure.
  • Response validation: Ensure your health endpoints return meaningful status information that accurately reflects the operational state of your services.

Security considerations​

  • Authentication: Ensure your health check endpoints are appropriately secured and not exposed to the public internet while considering separate authentication for monitoring versus functional endpoints. Balance security requirements with monitoring needs to maintain both system security and effective health monitoring capabilities.
  • Endpoint exposure: Be mindful of what information your health endpoints expose while avoiding the inclusion of sensitive system information in health responses. Consider implementing rate limiting for health check endpoints to prevent potential abuse and maintain system stability.